[lengomango]

From the piece:

"People have a weird habit of acting as if the university is an institution of the Enlightenment, dedicated to the free enquiry of the individual intellect. It’s not! The university, alongside the capitalist mode of production, is one of the only major institutions that come to us out of the Middle Ages. It belongs to the age of repetition: the era of Dede Korkut."

[pdonis]

The fact that some universities, such as Oxford, were founded in the Middle Ages does not mean that universities, today, as institutions, should be judged by the standards of the Middle Ages. Universities claim to be institutions of the Enlightenment (and Harvard was not founded in the Middle Ages anyway). They should be held to the standards they claim to be following.

[keiferski]

Universities of today have very little relation to the universities of the Middle Ages, other than occupying the same real estate and using the same name.

[Perceval]

This is precisely the category error the author is making: because the Middle Ages were an era of epic poetry, therefore all the descendant institutions from the Middle Ages belong to the methods/standards of epic poetry. It's nonsense on stilts.

Forcing Pindar's odes, Homer's epics, Njal's Saga, Dede Korkut, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Arthurian legends to follow the rules of the scientific method, and citation, and falsifiability, and judging them as stylistically and culturally deficient because they didn't sufficiently cite their influences would be bonkers. They would be ruined as pieces of art.

The reverse—allowing an R1 university to produce scientific knowledge using the rules of High Middle Ages poetry—is similarly ludicrous and ruinous.